ADOLPH

In Columbus, Ohio, in 2195, violent crime is essentially nonexistent — eliminated not by cultural progress, but by a covert government screening program quietly removing a genetic mutation called VSK-7 from the population without public knowledge or consent.

VSK-7 produces a drive for control through violence. At individual expression, it produces serial killers. At civilizational scale, it produced Caesar, Charlemagne, and the founders of the American republic.

Then a body is found. Then another. Then four more.

Federal geneticist Elin Voss is brought in after the second murder. She has been screening for VSK-7 markers her entire career without knowing it. What she uncovers in Columbus will answer the question she has never been able to ask directly: what her mother was, and what her mother's death actually was.

The novel alternates between the Columbus investigation and historical chapters tracking VSK-7's expression across three thousand years — from the Pontic steppe through the Vikings, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the founding of America, and the election of 2028. These chapters do not explain the present. They implicate it.